In the context of an audio conference, an audio mixer receives audio streams from most or all of the conference participants and sends back to the participants some combination of the received audio streams. For example, the audio mixer may send back a combination of the streams containing audio (e.g., voice) of those participants who are actually talking. If the audio mixer is sending audio streams which, when decoded, should sound the same for multiple participants, then where the participants are receiving streams encoded with the same encoder settings (e.g., same codec type, sampling frequency, etc.), processing resources are wasted to encode the same audio with essentially the same encoder (it should be noted that the modifier “essentially” is used because the codec state may differ for the different streams).